family

Much to my amazement, our nearly 4-year-old seems to have quite suddenly gotten the hang of reading.

Actual reading. Not just spitting back memorized texted in a simulacrum of reading. I still remember the first time I witnessed that, because it was the day we told all our friends we were pregnant. It was our friend M’s daughter’s third birthday, and she “read” me an entire book from front to back. I was in total shock that she could read so many words and so quickly, until her father pointed out that she had simply memorized the entire thing.

Our copy of Jumanji came with a CD of the audiobook narrated by Robin Williams. I put off playing it for EV6 as long as I could but finally the asking became more constant. I let her follow along with the book on the couch while I cried silently in the kitchen.

EV6 has always been good at memorization. It started one night when she was still impossibly small when she spat back the final page of Nightsongat me during her bedtime reading.

That was just the beginning. Since then I’ve heard this girl recite dozens of her books back at us – including a word-for-word rendition of Jumanji, and that is not a short children’s book.

Her current favorite thing to memorize is comic books, which I suppose must be slightly easier to do since you can focus on dialog balloons as if you are learning the script of a play. She has the entirety of the first 20 issues of Lumberjanes committed to memory. Sometimes she’s got it down after hearing it only two or three times, it’s amazing.

It’s amazing, and it keeps her nose buried in books all day every day, but it’s not reading.

I haven’t been too fussed with pushing reading skills on her while I’ve been staying at home. That’s in part because I learned to read so late, and partly because I feel like America’s school industrial process is overly quick to push advanced reading and math skills on kindergartners who aren’t always developmentally ready for them.

Despite that, I also haven’t ignored the skills. We’re always sounding out the words we encounter during the day and having little spelling bees on the refrigerator. I’s exclusively directed play and that’s fine. She’s three. I don’t expect her to read.

Hark, it is another post about baby waste, as they foretold! Our baby is at least this chubby. Detail of the Cherubs Fountain at St Peter’s Basilica or Basilica di San Pietro, Rome, Italy.

Of all of the challenges that fatherhood held in store for me, I felt the most trepidation about diapers. Luckily, my high-quality baby sensed my weakness in this area and toilet-trained herself to make my life easier.

Maybe I should start at the beginning.

Sure, no one takes a special delight in dealing with human waste (well, certain fetishists excluded), but I just don’t have the coping mechanisms in place for even the briefest of ordeals. Urine, at least, is typically sterile when it’s straight from the tap. The idea that poop might touch some part of my person was enough to cause an anxiety attack even before her birth. I don’t even do well with cleaning a toilet with a very long-handled and disposable brush.

Luckily, baby diapers are really not so hard to manage once you graduate from the initial “explosive bowel movements can happen at any time” phase. After a month or so of finding my footing with disposables so that I could whip them off and quickly … well, dispose of them … we graduated to cloth diapers. It took me a little while to come to peace with them using the same washing machine as all of my clothes, but as with everything else in my life I discovered and documented a multi-step coping process. With that in place, mostly they’re the same as normal diapers – you just roll them up, drop them in a smell-proof pail, and forget about the waste inside.

(Expansive cloth diapering made easy for people who just want to throw money at it without doing any crafting essay to come.)

Around the six-month mark, a new theme emerged. The problem was not #2, it was #1. For some reason, EV6 viewed the diaper coming off of her butt during a changing as a signal that NOW IS THE TIME TO PEE EVERYWHERE ZOMG GO FOR IT. If that baby had any liquid reserved in the nether half of her body, it was going to gurgle up and out in a matter of seconds once that tush was exposed to air.

This was amusing at first, mostly because EV6 is so incredibly chubby that she looks like some sort of Rubenesque cherub meant to be cast in plaster, peeing off of the side of an Italian fountain. She never failed to giggle maniacally while it happened.

That got me through the first 10 or 15 sopping wet diaper changes. Then I got a little frustrated. Really, EV6? You couldn’t have done that five seconds earlier when the diaper was still beneath your chubby bottom, or twenty seconds later into a new one?

At wit’s end and running twice the amount of laundry to compensate for all the soiled stuff, we ordered a potty she wouldn’t topple off of. I mean, why not? If I could even point her at the darn thing in time it would save a lot of soggy trouble.

Then a magical thing happened. After I rushed EV6 from the pad to the potty in the first few changes, she stopped her reflexive peeing and just waited for the potty. In fact, on many occasions she stopped wetting her diaper entirely and just saved it up for the inevitable potty trip. Then, realizing she vastly preferred the constant dry diaper over an routinely damp one, she began to signal her need to visit the potty while she was still dry.

The first few times this happened I had no idea what she was trying to tell me. It’s not like I was trying to teach her potty-training. There was no established routine or special sign language vocab. I was just avoiding getting hosed down like a front-row audience member at Sea World during changes. Meanwhile, she devised this whole language of little grunts, claps, and sleeve-tugs to indicate her potty-readiness.

I wish you could have been there the day I figured out what she was telling me. Mind: blown. I had always mocked the idea of “elimination communication” as a whacky excuse to hold your baby over a chamber pot every five minutes, yet this little cherub taught me how to communicate about elimination.

If that was the whole story it would be awesome enough. Yet, that is not the end. No. This baby got even more awesome all on her own. Because, you see, though the focus of this exercise was never #2, suddenly she also began hold them for the potty. I have not dealt with a smelly diaper in months.

Like, twenty minutes ago – hilariously, midway through writing this post – we were laying on the couch, and she was like, “Yo, father, potty me.” And I said, “What? Are you sure? We were just there half an hour ago. Aren’t you comfortable here? Aren’t we snuggling?”

She proceeded to stare directly into my eye, mash one fist into an open palm, and grunt at me, as if to say, “You better take this mother-smooshing baby to the mother-smooshing potty RIGHT NOW.”

Up she went with a totally clean, dry diaper. Back we came, having deposited a stink-bomb into the potty rather then earmarking it for the washing machine.

I’ve never been down for this whole “babies are miracles” nonsense, but in this particular instance this baby has been miraculous.

On day 41 of EV6’s life there is only one thing, living or animate, that I am positively sure she can identify other than E or I.

It is Mr. Bee.

We received a small assortment of stuffed and noisemaking creatures from our friends and family. I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with them. Even a seemingly tiny bunny or caterpillar is about as big as a newborn baby, give or take. I assumed she would thing all of these grinning creatures were just wildlife showing her a threat display and she would constantly cry and try to army-crawl away from them.

Mr. Bee by miYim was different. He looks so darn friendly. He has a firm body and exceedingly silly feet attached to his thorax with yarn legs. He has a small velcro cuff for affixing him to a car seat, stroller, or baby. And he makes an extremely pleasant dull jangle when he is shaken. It’s a very quiet, neutral sort of sound that I was willing to commit to hearing over and over again, if necessary.

I forget exactly where he started out, but I quickly migrated Mr. Bee to the changing table, because newborn babies have a complete meltdown every time you change them and I was desperate for anything to distract mine while I desperately wiped away her black tar poop.

I would jingle Mr. Bee once or twice, and then lay him on EV6’s chest or even cuff him to her wrist so she could keep on hearing the jingle while I changed her. Soon, I began announcing him. “It’s Mr. Bee,” I would exclaim, signaling that we were beginning a visit with her insect friend that just happened to coincide with a diaper change.

Eventually, the routine (which, keep in mind, happens 10-12 times a day) extended to include a little jingle to Mr. Bee’s jangle. I sing “Mr. Bee” three times in an ascending triad cued from his dull chiming, and then announce “It’s Mr. Bee!”

A little over a week ago we were having a gibbering freak out about EV6 smiling at us randomly while sitting on the couch. The next time I changed her and sang the Mr. Bee jingle, I noticed she smiled then, too! I was usually just so busy grabbing changing implements and psychologically preparing myself for runny mustard poop that I hadn’t noticed when she started doing it!

I asked E if she had noticed this, and she said she had never witnessed the phenomenon.

“Well, are you doing the routine?”

“Um, I show her the Bee, if that’s what you mean.”

“No, you sort of have to announce him.”

“I suppose I do say, ‘It’s Mr. Bee.'”

“No, no, no,” I responded, and escorted her upstairs to the changing table to show her my specific Mr. Bee salutation.

As it turns out, my strategy worked entirely. EV6 has not cried during a diaper change for weeks as long as they are preceded by Mr. Bee. We have even extended his good will to a goodbye ceremony where he gives her a little bop on the nose and then flies back to the shelf.

As far as she is concerned, diaper changes are Mr. Bee Variety Showtime, a feature of which is one of the big humans doing a lot of wiping and patting of her behind.

(Epilogue: E tracked down the friend who bought Mr. Bee for us, and she said she purchased him at a Whole Foods because he made the least offensive noise of all the various baby toys. Also, his name is Bailey, he is $10, and we’ve already purchased a backup.)

I know that over time it’s going to be important for her to hear short, digestible stories with small, distinguishable words – and we’ve got plenty of those lying about. However, an adorable 20-page book that I can read in four minutes really isn’t serving me to well in the “reading to baby” segment of my day right now. The point is more for her to hear one of our voices, steady and ongoing, until she calms down, gets bored, or falls asleep, depending on the situation.

Honestly, we could just be doing a mic check for twenty minutes. “Baby, one two. Baby, hey hey hey. Baby, chic-ah, shhh, chic-ah, one two.”

I’ve also gotten in the habit of reading Wikipedia’s pages aloud whenever I hit a concept in my constant monologuing to her that I can’t explain, like why a living room is called a parlor. I see this as preemptively equipping myself for the litany of whys we’ll be experiencing in a few years.

We actually started this one in the womb. E had read that reading to a baby in utero in a calm, quiet environment was a good way for it to learn your voices. She also read that the fetus could track light sources at a certain point, which lead to a hilarious sequence of me shining a flashlight on E’s pregnant belly while I read Vogon poetry. Now that EV6 is an actual baby, she doesn’t like this as much, despite my switching to the illustrated version. Generally, she doesn’t prefer things interrupted by too much dialog, especially given the fact that I cannot help but do crazy character voices throughout.

EV6 doesn’t always latch on to this when I start, but when she does she’s hooked for an entire canto. My reading is complete with my personal cliff notes on every canto. E thought I was reading them from somewhere! Nope, just used to be really obsessed with Dante in a sort of defense about how hating Shakespeare did not make me stupid.

In week two I was freaking out that we didn’t have enough high-contrast black and white images available to develop EV6’s vision. E has this huge set of Time Life photography books, so she picked the one packed with the most images for us to page through and read excerpts from. Some of the photos were pretty depressing, but EV6 did pay attention almost the entire time.

I have these committed to memory on some subconscious level such that I kind of skim the words on the page and just recite the story. That makes a certain amount of sense, I suppose, since that is how toddlers “read” books, and these are books I heard A LOT when I was a toddler.

Short and cloying, but so wonderfully positive that I can hardly fault it. (Also, this was written for Tori Amos’s daughter, and I quite clearly recall when she was born during my sophomore of college, so it tends to make me feel old.)

On night three of baby EV6’s life she was having a moment of baby sleeplessness, so I decided to read her a story.

We had amassed a stack of children’s books from friends and family. It included both favorites I recognized (Sendak, especially), obscurities, and newer classics. That night I decided to go with something middle-of-the-road, and so I picked up a collection of Curious George stories and began to read.

As I read, I noticed three things.

One, the story was awful. This dumb monkey was misbehaving and breaking things, and everyone both complained about it and found it endearing. I’ve noticed this is a theme in many children’s books, like the horrid Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. I’m all for a mischievous protagonist, but not for one who is clearly a villain and in need of a time out.

Two, on top of the terrible tale, the grammar was lamentable. I found myself both silently correcting punctuation and audibly rearranging words to ensure the story would not poison my young child’s future sentence construction skills.

Three, baby EV6 gave no shits. About the story, I mean. She had been pooping regularly all day. I know, she was three days old – how much did I expect her to follow the story? Not at all. Really. But, I did expect the rhythm of my reading to be pleasing to her, or else I could have just talked her to sleep (a skill I surely possess).

That last point is what made me the angriest at this stupid monkey as I tossed aside the volume in disgust. For all the crimes of bad character and bad grammar, at the very least the writing could have a bit of meter to make up for it. Most good toddler books do have a sort of a rhythm to their words, even if they don’t rhyme or make verse. But this poor primate’s tale was a clunky monkey.

EV6 in one arm, I marched the few steps from our rocking chair to the bookshelf. I wasted not a second on the shelf of children’s books where I previously dwelled. This time I went for one of my even less favorite areas – Shakespeare. I am generally no fan of the bard, but I do still have my favorites. Amongst them, The Tempest, which is what I picked up.

Compared to Spurious George, The Tempest was practically a sleeping potion. It took less than two scenes to put my newborn entirely to sleep, entranced by the rhythm of my speech as Prospero enlightened Miranda of her early life in Britain, before they were both marooned on their lonely, sunlit isle.

It was then I decided: babies don’t just need baby books. At least, not at first. Before they can comprehend a story or enjoy a colorful picture, babies aren’t too interested in the narrative. What they want to hear is your voice – that same voice that spoke to them all the time from the otherwise of the wall of their womb.

There are some bloggers who reveal every little detail of their children’s lives. Dooce, who I’ve been reading since before she had kids (or even lost her job), famously discusses not only the names but also photos, conversations, personal details, and medical challenges of her two daughters. I feel as though I know everything but their shoe sizes, and could probably find that out with some digging.

I have zero judgement to pass on Dooce or thousands of other bloggers who share the details of their kids’ lives, but I’m not sure it’s for me.

Or, more accurately, I’m not sure it’s for me to plaster her ridiculous exploits all over my blog. Do you need to know all about her pooping? What about the face she makes that bears an uncanny resemblance to Grumpy Cat – should I post a picture? What if my daughter turns into a meme?

At the same time, I don’t want to miss out on all these fun stories! People mommy- and daddy-blog for a reason – because children are insane and unfiltered and hilarious and unreasonable. They’re instant entertainment. I’ve spent the entirety of today mostly just laughing at our baby.

What happens when those two things intersect? When in grade two I read her a post, and she says, “I’d rather you not mention that, father,” and then I say, “Oh, shit, hopefully that’s not retroactive, because otherwise I’ve got about six years worth of posts about you eating things you found on the floor to redact now.” What happens when her classmates begin GOOGLING? Aren’t my own exploits embarrassing enough for the both of us?

Parents have to make a lot of decisions for their children, so usually the consent is theirs. But there are some decisions that it’s not really fair for a parent to make. I wouldn’t permanently alter my daughter’s body, or decide who she’ll eventually marry – those things are for her to determine herself, much later. And, I don’t want to tell her story to the entire internet before she even knows it’s her story to tell.

After much deliberation, OCD Godzilla and I have reached a compromise. I will blog about some of her exploits, but nothing medical or blackmail-worthy, and not by name – especially because it is so unique. Since my wife’s moniker has become the brief E, and since my daughter is the sixth E-lady in a row in her family, she will be known as E Version 6.0, or EV6 for short.

In addition to differentiating her from wife E, this is also a terrible pun about her being a sociopathic X-Files villain and/or one of my least-favorite bands of all time. Also, it neatly resolves the possibility of a horrible nothingness being released across the internet because my baby doesn’t have a name.

Finally, in lieu of her actual name, please accept this comprehensive list of her nicknames to date:

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